Increasingly, secure, private, or licensed content is being distributed over the Internet. Individuals, enterprises, and governments are supplying and acquiring content via the Internet. With these exploding phenomena, there is a variety of challenges presented to the content provider.
For instance, the content provider may not be particularly adept at authenticating users for access to its content. Consequently, the content provider may want to offload the authentication and/or licensing enforcement to one or more third-party services. For, that matter, the content provider may even want to offload content delivery to a third-party, since the content provider may not be skilled at streaming content or may not have the necessary resources, such as bandwidth capabilities, for properly vending the content to its users.
It is particularly difficult for a single service provider to perform all services well, which may be associated with secure content delivery. That is, a service provider may provide good authentication and licensing enforcement but the same service provider may not perform well at or have the resources to perform well at content delivery.
Moreover, if authentication and/or license enforcement are offloaded then the content delivery often has to be integrated with or interfaced to the service that provides the authentication and/or license enforcement. This means that features associated with content delivery are often tightly coupled and integrated with features associated with authentication and/or license enforcement. So, if one changes then the other has to be modified as well reflect the changes. This creates challenges for maintenance and support.
To streamline the authentication, a content provider may forgo customized identity based access by setting up sites that are geared towards groups of users having the same access rights or licensing rights to content. Yet, this is not acceptable because what often ends up occurring is the content provider ends up managing a plethora of sites for the same content, where each site has its own access rights to satisfy varying customer demands.
So, in general content providers either end up with complicated delivery services or redundant and disparate delivery services for the same content being delivered.
Therefore, it is advantageous to provide techniques for more secure and distributed content delivery that is more manageable and less complicated.